Reflections on the 9th BITSS Annual Meeting
Toward a more Open and Inclusive Scientific Ecosystem
The extended version of this post, written by Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) Senior Program Associate Aleks Bogdanoski and Senior Program Manager Katie Hoeberling, is published on the BITSS Blog. BITSS — managed by CEGA — strengthens the integrity of research and evidence used for policy-making through research and capacity building activities.
Introduction
We look forward each year to the BITSS Annual Meeting as a space for discussing new meta-research and open science initiatives, as well as for reuniting with old colleagues and welcoming new ones, normally with handshakes and hugs. This year has been anything but normal, though. And while many of the old suspects joined us to continue deliberating issues we typically discuss, the program and our conversations reflected a world shaken up by a global pandemic, social unrest, and widespread questioning of what “normal” means within the scientific community and beyond.
While the policies and social processes that have brought about COVID-19 and widening awareness of structural racism are by no means new, there is a new sense of urgency to address the roots of these issues, as well as an understanding that these phenomena are deeply connected. Our presentations and discussions revealed how scientists are rethinking the ways science is and should be done, partly in response to these.
In addition to improving the credibility of social science, speakers highlighted how transparency has facilitated access, collaboration, and co-creation. Affording access to rich datasets, for example, like those produced by the Landsat program and the US Census Bureau, helps diversify the community of scientists who use the data, as well as the research topics of the publications associated with the data. Relatedly, distributed data collection or analysis through meta-analyses with individual participant data, multi-lab replications, forecast collection, or crowdsourcing reproductions can grow the pool of people involved in research and help us understand biases and credibility. Transparently reporting findings and underlying uncertainties can make research more reusable, especially for evidence synthesis. And perhaps most presciently, open science policy has encouraged and enabled broad access to data that can be used to understand the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Efforts like these are critical to democratizing science, but they can only get us so far. We heard from several initiatives that are working to widely share educational and pedagogical materials, as well as open source infrastructure. These resources can help meet the growing demand for open science training and ensure a diverse group of researchers can participate in a rapidly evolving scientific landscape. But as our second keynote panelists reminded us, open science is limited in its ability to promote equity and inclusion if it ignores the processes that create and perpetuate systemic exclusion outside of academia.
We’re still processing many of the conversations we had at our first virtual Annual Meeting. In the spirit of transparency, we’ve provided a “TV Guide” with descriptions of each presentation, plus links to video recordings, slides, and other presentation materials. We welcome you to watch, read, and reflect with us on our collective understanding of normalcy. What can we learn from this last year and what should we carry forward? As always, thank you for joining us from wherever you are. We hope to see you in person at next year’s Annual Meeting!
Below we present the summaries of the two keynote panels. For a summary of all presentations, see the full-length post on the BITSS Blog.
Day 1 | Keynote Panel: Challenges and Opportunities of Transparency in COVID-19 Research
Moderated by Maya Petersen (UC Berkeley), Carrie D. Wolinetz (NIH), Samir Bhatt (ICL), and Joakim Weill (UC Davis) reflected on how open data has fostered discovery and facilitated collaboration in the context of COVID-19 research. Fortunately, actors in both the public and private sectors have recognized the urgency created by the pandemic and worked to increase access to data and code. This access has also spurred interdisciplinary collaboration and increased scientific output, which in turn has emphasized the value of peer review and domain expertise. To maintain and build on this progress, the panelists underlined the need to invest in infrastructure that incentivizes and rewards transparency practices such as data sharing. They also pointed out that greater data transparency has sharpened the tensions between openness and the need to protect the privacy of study participants — an issue that is yet to be resolved.
Day 2 | Keynote Panel: Open Science for a more Democratic and Inclusive Scholarship
Beginning with the premise that Mertonian and democratic norms are fundamental to a just and well-functioning scientific ecosystem, this panel sought to explore how departing from these can disproportionately harm marginalized groups. The panelists represented a variety of initiatives advancing openness and inclusion through open educational tools and alternative metrics for career advancement (Juan Pablo Alperin, Scholarly Communications Lab), open peer review and mentorship (Antoinette Foster, PREreview), and knowledge equity and open access (Leslie Chan, Knowledge Equity Lab). While the conversation explored how open science tools and practices can advance equity and inclusion, the speakers helped us take a step back to discuss how centering standards of whiteness and Western perspectives creates structural barriers that stretch from long before students enter the academic pipeline and perpetuate inequality throughout it. They left us with several important questions: Who makes the rules, and whom do they impact? Where do norms and senses of legitimacy come from, and whom do they serve? How do norms and policies manifest in our personal and interpersonal lives, as well as in our institutions and structures? While we don’t have all the answers, we’re excited to infuse these questions into everything we do, and hope that others in the research transparency movement do the same.
For more details on the additional panels, breakout room sessions, and lightning talks, read the extended version on the BITSS Blog.
